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Find Your Ground

This article by Diane Roberts, “environmentalist, novelist, and radio commentator living in and proudly representing the Sunshine State,” says so much I want to express about the impact of living in organic architecture.

“The house rises up from dark alluvial soil among the magnolias, sweet gums, and renegade ardisia that now grow too close to it, pushing toward the sun. Come upon it at dusk, before the sulfureous lights from the nearby highway mask the early stars, and it looks at once ancient and modern and completely impossible: this is Tallahassee, for God’s sake, where aspirational architecture means white columns and porticos and plaster rosettes, endless air-conditioned iterations of Tara and Twelve Oaks. This house does not celebrate the rectangular; it’s all arcs and hemicycles, one side wood and stone with half-moon windows; one side all glass with prow-shaped balconies cresting an invisible swell. It looks like one of those boat-shaped oratories hermit monks built on sea-whipped Irish cliffs a thousand years ago, secret, lonely and holy, but it’s unmistakably the work of America’s greatest architect, improbably planted in the North Florida woods.”